Support thread for house sellers

[Spirael]

Just what it says on the tin, really! I'm sure there must be other stressed house sellers out there? Hopefully we can band together and get some small joy of (hopefully?) seeing our houses sell so we can get a move on!

This is a thread of hand holding and mutual support for the EA dealings, weeks of silence, frantic house tidying, no-show viewings, silly offers and tough decisions. This is not for house bashing and price slating. There are plenty of other threads for that!

I've been trying to sell for a year now. Had a surge of viewings earlier in the summer making the right noises, but all has gone quiet for the last few weeks.

However, we have a viewing booked for later this afternoon from someone who has sold their house and is able to proceed - wanting to move before Christmas. Currently swinging between pessimistic and optimistic, while trying not to look at the house we want to buy!

Anyone else out there? :)

Adorable but teeny, YellowWellies!

Head not heart Cuddy.

These houses that are on at crazy prices though - well, this might not apply in cases where all the houses on the road are the same, but in the few years I've been watching the market closely it has been interesting to see that actually a few of the houses on at apparently silly prices have gone for something close to asking eventually. Most don't, of course, but if you're not in any kind of a rush to sell it isn't entirely irrational to put your house on at a kite-flying price and see if anyone with more money than sense bites. There's a big house in my village that went eventually after a couple of years despite everyone in the village laughing about it. The vendor was in a position to wait because he sold off half the garden to finance his purchase of his downsize house. Eventually a rich banker with roots in the area turned up and bought it as a weekend retreat.
Meanwhile houses where the vendor has been in a hurry have been reduced massively.

Congratulations YellowWellies, fab news!

Well we've been busy today. Our interested buyer upped his bid again, on condition we cancelled tomorrow's open house and that we are out by early December. We were very tempted to accept his offer (it is more than we imagined we'd get) but have decided to proceed with the 16 viewers we have tomorrow. We just found out the house we hoped to get has sold so we are kind of starting from scratch with looking. I've booked three viewings for the morning so hopefully one of them will be good. One is kind of out of our budget but is huge with an amazing garden - worth a look I think!

Viewing tomorrow at midday. DH arriving home from business trip on the redeye at around 11. I burnt the rice cooking my dinner so the house smells of burnt rice.

Washing on the line got rained on and I haven't yet cleaned up the fox poo in the garden. If this candidate tomorrow ends up buying the house it'll be a miracle!

On seemingly unrealistic asking prices. The house across the road from where we are currently renting sold for £390k about 3 months ago (the info was just released). We thought our old neighbours were bonkers when they put it up at that price (as we were looking to buy and knew what their competition was priced at). But they sold very quickly for full asking price, which makes it the most expensive house on our street by a long way. They did a lot of work on the house (various extensions and a loft conversion) so we have no idea if they broke even on all that, but they got about £100k more than comparable properties were/are even asking for.

We concluded that the market makes no sense at all right now.

Good luck for the viewing today Marshmallow. Fox poo - possibly the stickiest poo there is

Stinkiest I meant!!

I think it's the sparseness of both buyers and sellers making extremes more likely. You can see it in the indexes as well - they fluctuate more with a slower market. While it's true that as YellowWellies says, there's a falling market which benefits upsizers, the other factor is that in a sparse market the people who benefit are the ones with the most flexibility about where and when to move.

Fingers crossed for you MarshmallowPie. If nothing else it would be so cool if this was the one because then you could dispense soothing advice to anxious sellers in the future all about how your house stank of burnt rice, there was fox poo on the lawn etc, but the buyer still liked it....

First viewing in 9 minutes. I have butterflies it's a cash buyer!

First viewing done. Very polite, asked lots of rehearsed questions but I don't think she was sufficiently blown away here just 30 mins. Her relatives really liked it and asked me for details of my wallpaper and curtain fabric as they're just doing up a cottage. Maybe they were property tourists looking for design ideas!

You never know - fingers crossed. No viewings for us today so I'm now watching back to back Location Location...

Is it sufficiently old programmes that you think wow that's cheep to everything?

Estate agent closed at 4 and not open again till Monday so it's been a quiet launch into the quiet market here. 1 viewing three days on market. Hopefully it will provoke interest for next weekend. At least the kids and I can be messy tomorrow as we know no one can phone to look around. I might cook everything with garlic or a potent curry because I'm guessing that will need to be avoided on potential viewing days.

The thing with Location Location is that they love the houses and offer on them and the deal is done - makes me jealous! Our EA is open Sundays so I'm always prepared (ish)

Ooh Toomuchtea I would be so envious! There really is nothing like the smell of a teenage bedroom - we have just had to clean up after another dreaded sleepover!!

Gives hope to the rest of us green eyed soles that there is movement in the market!

It's not the offer bit that stresses me its the posturing between offer and sale I'm not looking forwards to.

I sold my last house to a couple who kept changing their mind then on day of exchange wanted another 10% off. I had a deep and meaningful with family, arranged funding to stay and it was all back on at original sale price when I called their bluff! I was so exhausted at the end I was really quite ill for a few weeks.

But I may yet wait a long time for a offer and eat my words that its the selling bit that's the stress.

Our gamble not to cancel the open house paid off - we already have two offers equalling the one we turned down on Friday. Am hoping to get as much as we possibly can as we totally fell in love with the house we saw on Saturday but it is out of our budget. We are doing our sums and trying to work out if we can afford it.

Good for you Woodlands! Great news! Also try to work out how you'd feel if the market dropped the 5 or 10% most commentators are predicting for this year. Would you be in NE? Would you be ok with that if you were (i.e. is this a forever house or are you likely to have to move with work etc in the foreseeable)? We'd not be cool with this as our deposit is all money saved from actual earnings and living like church mice - rather than 'earned' from house price growth - hence we're moving into renting until the market in our target area slows down a bit - at present it's falling £2k a month and that would wipe out our equity in a scarily quick time if it continued. I think we're going to wait until next summer at the earliest. It is sheer torture not to look at rightmove for new houses.... as I'm a bit excited .

Went to the solicitors today to confirm our acceptance of the offer - so just waiting for the paperwork to trundle through now. The buyers' proposed move date is the 11th January - which works perfectly for us as even if I went over my due date we'd still have time to have the baby up here and not have to move for a month or so....

Our house looks disgusting as there is clutter and mess everywhere. After a weekend of being slatterns I want to have a bit of a clean - even though we have no more viewings... I think I've got used to living in a nice 'show house'. It must be a form of house-selling Stockholm syndrome.

I know, we're very conscious (or at least my DH is) not to overextend ourselves. I think we would expect to live there for at least ten years. I would worry about interest rates going up to 10-15% but if that happens we're all fucked anyway really, plus we're going for a 5 year fixed rate mortgage. We're not going to go about 70% LTV on our mortgage so should avoid negative equity, I hope.

I wonder why people who don't have their houses on the market need to inspect your cupboards and wardrobes - it's a bit cheeky! Well I haven't heard from the guy who made a very low offer last Monday. It would be nice to know either way.

Am considering taking the house off soon and might whack the heating up to 30 degrees :) I just can't see where any more viewers are likely to emerge from. No one around here is upsizing and we don't even have any competition. Ooh what to do!?

Thinking of taking ours off too. Had a viewing on the weekend and have another one booked (and some old folk knocked on our door to ask what the area was like-strange!)-but will fall off my chair in shock if anyone actually makes another offer now. Bit depressing being rejected all the time-especially after all the tidying up I have to do.
Maybe I'll give it another week!

We had 2 viewings on Saturday in the end - one thought the rooms and garden were 'too small' and the other apparently liked it but was going to get back to the agent with a final answer. Had rather too many of those 'waiting for them to come back with a final answer' style of responses, it's like a job interview where you know you are being fobbed off without proper feedback.

No more viewings booked for this week...new agents will be taking photos at the end of the week so hopefully next week it will be a fresh start for us.

Our first viewing is coming back for a second, shock. The odd bit is she felt that the one of the bedrooms might need extending for her daughter. They're all generous doubles so neither I nor the agent quite get it. Not very easy to extend so I'm trying to get the agent to probe for which room. If its the nursery it might be because its the one room that I hadn't had the chance to present and its over furnished with stuff I should have shifted. I guess I'll be shifting furniture this week then!